Brighter Product Marketing

Dear Boss,

As you are aware, we are already preparing for yet another trade show on the East Coast, this time in Washington, D.C. However, I have a big concern. While the first show in New York generated a lot of publicity for our new product launch, the number of leads we have had from subsequent shows has been minimal. The resulting business has not come close to paying for our costs to attend these big events.

I would therefore like to suggest that we politely withdraw from this upcoming show, even though we may forfeit our $20,000 space reservation fee, which we have already paid. This way we will save the additional $20,000 to $30,000 it costs us to attend a show, by the time you add up all the booth costs, transportation and people costs. It is all valuable marketing money! We could use this for some other campaign that has a better chance of success.

Sincerely,

Your Marketing Manager

P.S. There are humans working at the D.C. show organizers. If you let me discuss this with them, perhaps we can recoup some of the monies paid or role it over to some other event, despite what the contract says.

Dear Boss,

Apart from speaking at the Silicon Valley Code camp, I am also addressing the Mid Peninsula Professional Alliance to talk about branding for the smaller business. We will be covering how to discover and specifically measure your brand touch points so that you know where to have the company spend its time.

Once again I will have to preach that branding is not graphics or advertising, and doesn’t need to cost any extra. But it can become the golden thread that runs through all departments and dramatically streamlines decision making.

Mark March 20th for am breakfast meeting.

Sincerely,

Your Marketing Manager

Dear Boss,

I appreciate your concern that we have accidentally named our new product line after an old Grateful Dead song name, and your efforts to check the copyright.  But really it does not matter. We are not using the music or the lyrics from the song. That is really what is copyrighted. We are only using the name, and names are trademarked, not copyrighted.

Furthermore, names are trademarked by category, and so we are OK as long as we never get into the music business.  In fact, it might even be stronger than that as I believe record titles are like book titles in that they cannot be trademarked or protected and duplicates are allowed.

In the same vein, if you hear from engineering that our box is different to competitors in that we have more connectors, then that is not enough for us to be free to use our competitor’s name. That might be a distinguishing detail in a patent filing – which protects designs – but not nearly different enough for trademark clearance. Trademarks are filed by category, and you only have to be “confusingly similar” to be in big trouble. There are only 35 trademark classes for goods and 10 for services. They are summarized on Brighter Naming’s website as well as many country trademark web pages, since trademarks are country specific though most use the International Class system. Big exception is Canada who still use old class system but the intent is the same.

Sincerely,

Your Marketing Manager

Dear Boss,

At the upcoming Silicon Valley Product Camp, Brian Lawley of the 280 Group will be talking about the Seven Phase Standard Product Life Cycle, as well as the associated key documents that are used at each stage.

Since we don’t even document our phases and since some of our junior product managers don’t even understand this life cycle concept, can you please encourage them all to attend March 24 in San Jose at the eBay conference center?

Sincerely,

Your Marketing Manager

PS I see my old class notes have a few extra phases:

Dear Boss,

I recently stopped for some gas and a snack in a central California town. Do you notice anything unusual about the packaging for the chips? Yes it is in Spanish first and English second.

So the big food brands are already dealing with the reality of having 44million latinos in the USA. A group bigger than most other countries! Since we have to package like this for Central and South America, why don’t we just start doing it at home right now? It is especially appropriate in all the southern and western states of course.

Your Marketing Manager.

Dear Boss,

We can’t just keep giving our products names like J46. Maybe we understand internally that is a name, but to rest of world it sounds like a part number. So it is impossible to relate to. Hence hard to recall or grow attached to or refer along the chain. After all the hours we have spent arguing about names that our lawyer promptly rejects, isn’t it about time we got help?

Sincerely, Your Marketing Manager

PS Naming agencies only charge $5,000 or so for big corporations nowadays, with full legal and language clearances. I bet we can get it for half that as we are only a small business.

This picture shows part of the cover of my sister’s first book in the Chimona series of how little critters come to life on the banks of a lake in Canada and interact with their human friends. Now that Rosie Reay is already well along with Book 4 in the series (see www.chimona.com), the reaction to this first cover never ceases to amaze me. Firstly, children have no problem with it at all. And most grandparents are in the same camp.

But the rest of the audience is split into two highly divergent camps. At one trade show, a lady who took the trouble to emphasize she was a twenty year veteran professional graphics designer, said how striking, direct and eye catching the illustration was, and for me to please relay that to the artist. So thanks Candace McMullan up there in Canada. On other hand we have been getting some paid reviews lately and I can’t believe that adults are asking how can a gopher type on a keyboard? And how can little critters interface with humans that are so much bigger?

So the motto of this story is the same as it is often for marketing. Don’t confuse perception with reality. After all, how come Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are about the same size as your kid? And never mind how Chimona can type on his keyboard when the bigger question might be how come he has a Mac laptop in his kayak, and knows how to use a spreadsheet on it at all! Not to mention the fact his twin sisters each have a cell phone.

Have your kids read these books – or grandpa to the kids if they are not yet reading. Let them look up more details on the matching website then they can explain it all to you – including how to run a basic naming exercise for your new product line. They can even download it onto their own laptops or Kindle’s to read on the road.

Dear Boss,

We just wasted another marketing meeting talking about the current social media phenomenon. Yes it is strange and intangible. Yes it may be important to use in the near future. But we are a product company. First we have to ship product, sell some customers and get some direct feedback.

Then, and only then, can we go chasing our elusive social following and community through all the popular channels of the day. Otherwise we are just caught in a good old vaporware trap talking about paper tigers.

Sincerely, Your Marketing Manager

Dear Boss,

I know I haven’t been on board long, but there is something that concerns me greatly, especially as we start all the new marketing campaigns I’ve got lined up. And that is the fact that as I walk around the company, I notice everyone has their own little system for tracking contacts and leads. And even you pass me little notes with a name or number to call and I have nowhere to go to see what previous contact we have had with that person. Or where the lead originated. Not to mention what is the address or email or website. Some of our employees are still digging through little business card decks looking for information!

So I would like to suggest that we move as quickly as possible to install some central contact management system that everyone in the company can use. Then we can all provide the best customer service, we can all help the sales and marketing teams, we can all help support. Furthermore, we can track our leads and hence the effectiveness of our campaigns, and grow our own little company database of contacts. If we code them right, you will be able to see at a glance who we have for prospects from a given event, the latest contact with all our customers, and all the press, analysts, partners and vendors we deal with daily. You’ll be able to record contacts and leads that you are personally so good at bringing in, and we will be able to follow up and do the detail work, knowing full well what you have said and promised them.

My guess is that some software resellers have already bugged you with offerings and told you how they can customize their packages just for us (and for their fee!). Send them on their way. There are good economical off-the-shelf solutions now. If it can’t work straight out-of-the-box for the first 3 months here, small as we are, we don’t need it anyway. They are easy enough to install in a couple of hours if MIS will simply give us access to the server. Alternatively, we can use a remote service that requires no installation at all, like those from SalesForce.com or SugarCRM.

PS This way, our company information database becomes a valuable asset in as of itself.

Dear Boss,

Yes I know some people only talk about the 3 P’s of marketing, but they are pretty old-fashioned and out of date. If you do need to boil it down to a short list, then these are the 8 P’s of marketing for all product marketing managers to concentrate on:

1. Product
2. Price
3. Placement
4. Promotion
5. Packaging
6. Planning
7. People
8. Precedent

Sincerely,

Your Marketing Manager